Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)

He was going to find out.

* * * *

She lived in a converted townhouse on a street just this side of the Georgetown boundary, an address that would suggest upscale without costing the arm and the leg really upscale would cost.

Her apartment was on the first floor, in the rear. A small kitchen, small dining alcove, small living room, small bedroom. She was a Realtor; he suspected she’d call the place cozy, not small, but small was what it was.

Still, it had charm. He’d already been inside: the locks were pitifully simple to open. She’d furnished it in what he thought of as English country style: light colors, a profusion of small potted plants, flowered wallpaper in the kitchen and bathroom, white wrought iron furniture huddled against the fast-approaching winter on a patio that overlooked a minuscule, thickly overgrown garden.

After five days and nights, he knew a lot about her.

She drove a black Subaru Outback wagon. It was spotless.

So was she.

She emerged from the little house each morning, impeccably dressed. She favored suits, as she had that day back in October. Mid-height hee

ls, not the sexy stilettos he knew he’d never forget. Her hair was always neatly drawn back: he remembered how it had come undone that night, how it had fallen over her shoulders like pale gold.

The sight of her stirred memories he didn’t want. Her sea-and-flower scent. Her slightly husky voice. Her arms open to draw him down to her.

The images were there, every morning. And, every morning, he blanked his mind to them and fell in behind her, on foot on those days she walked to work, from behind the wheel of the black Prius he’d rented on those days she drove.

The Prius fit right into the neighborhood.

The Porsche was garaged in the hotel where he’d taken a suite, though he was hardly ever there except to shower, change clothes, and grab a nap for a couple of hours while she was at her office.

Maintaining a one-man surveillance was difficult, but he had no desire to involve anybody else. He trusted the people who worked for him, but something about this was too personal to involve anybody else.

She left for work promptly at eight, returned home promptly at six unless she had a showing or a meeting. She’d had two since he’d begun watching her. Whether she came home early or not, he never saw her with a man.

If there was one thing in her behavior that seemed unusual, it was the number of times during the night that lights went on and off in her bedroom and kitchen.

What was she doing?

He went in again, planted a video camera the size of a penny in the center of a basket of silk flowers on her dresser, tucked another on a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen.

He forced himself to look away any time she began to undress although even the sight of her hands going to a zipper, a button made him think of things that had nothing to do with a surveillance.

He cursed himself for it, told himself that he’d been too long without a woman, but it was worth the self-inflicted embarrassment when the camera showed him that when the light came on in the small hours of the night, she reached for a book that she held in her hands but never read, or padded into the tiny kitchen for a glass of water that she never drank.

You didn’t have to be a trained spook or a Special Ops agent to figure out that she had insomnia.

They had that much in common.

His sleep had been shot to hell since that October night.

Did her sleep problems date back to those same hours? The speculation made him laugh. He’d have been willing to bet she hadn’t given a thought to that night. It had just been something she’d done. A kick. The kind of thing Young had told him she liked to do.

Assuming that was the truth.

He observed her for five days and five nights.

And grew puzzled.

If Young was her lover, how come he never showed up?

If she went in for sexual dalliances—and why was he being so careful with his language? If she screwed around, where was the traffic to her bed?